Page 8
It had been fifteen years since Sera had seen Francesca (unless you counted the moody greyscale photograph in the announcement the Guild had sent out when Francesca had been elected Chancellor, which Sera didn’t), and she scarcely recognised her.
Teenage Francesca had had a rebellious sense of mischief, an almost manic energy, and a loud, easy laugh.
This Francesca, on the other hand, was cool and collected and looked like she wouldn’t know laughter if it smacked her in the head.
Her mouth was pressed into a straight line, her hair was arranged in a complicated updo designed to make her look older, and she wore a slim black pantsuit that had been pressed to within an inch of its life.
“Chancellor Grey.” Sera was immediately her spikiest self. “I’d say it was nice to see you, but it isn’t.”
“I see your library of talents is still missing the book on diplomacy,” Francesca replied. “May I have a word?”
Sera gestured vaguely at a chair, using the opportunity to glance around.
Theo edged closer to her, but Clemmie, as she’d suspected, was nowhere to be seen.
How she’d vanished so quickly and thoroughly was anyone’s guess, but Sera knew from experience that Clemmie’s speedy, sneaky fox form had its advantages.
Francesca stepped into the room. Her eyes flickered to Theo, who was practically pressed up against Sera’s side by now. The top of his head reached her chin, and she could feel how shallow his breathing was.
“I’ll make tea,” Jasmine said too brightly, which was also code for I want to get as far away from this room as I possibly can, and keep the rest of our nosey household at bay while I’m at it . She shut the parlour door as she left.
“You must be Theodór,” Francesca said. Her eyes flicked briefly to Sera’s. “I gather from his records that he reads a great deal of advanced texts.”
“How are your children?” Sera asked, ignoring the implication that Francesca had guessed who was really reading most of those advanced texts. At Francesca’s furrowed brow, she explained, “They were mentioned in the Guild’s newsletter about the election.”
“Oh. Of course. The twins are well, thank you. They’re three years old now.”
“And learning from the best and brightest already, I imagine.”
“No. They’re not magical.”
Had Sera been crueller, she might have laughed at the thought of Albert Grey’s reaction when he realised his grandchildren, the future of his illustrious family tree, had not a speck of magic between them.
Instead, she found herself feeling sorry for the young twins, who would no doubt have discovered already that their grandfather had no interest in them now that he had no use for them.
Her voice softened slightly. “Three’s very young. Their magic could still show itself.”
“They’ve been rigorously tested. Father insisted.”
And because Sera was Sera, she couldn’t help pointing out the obvious. “So was it before or after you had the twins that you noticed how much of a fuckwit your father is?”
Theo had a sudden, conveniently timed coughing fit. Francesca’s cheek twitched with what may have been the third cousin twice removed of a smile, but she only said, “Father and I have a complicated relationship.”
“Do you?” Sera asked, a distinct bite in her voice. “I don’t remember you feeling so ambivalent fifteen years ago.”
“You broke our laws, Sera. You brought someone back from the dead! Did you really think there wouldn’t be any consequences?”
“Consequences?” Sera laughed without any real humour.
“I expected consequences, Francesca. I risked those consequences because I couldn’t stand the thought of losing my only real family.
What I didn’t expect was for you to look me in the eye, swear to keep my secret, and immediately turn around and throw me under the fucking bus! ”
Francesca dropped her gaze to the floor. “I shouldn’t have done that. I couldn’t lie to Father, but you were my friend. I should have at least talked to you before I told him what you’d done. I’m sorry.”
Sera, who had never imagined for a moment that Francesca would acknowledge she’d done anything wrong, was so taken aback that her anger popped like a balloon.
In its place, she found pity. Francesca had been a child too.
She’d been a product of the Guild’s centuries of snobbery, the only daughter of a proud, immensely powerful man, and the haste with which she’d told her father what Sera had done might have had as much to do with fear as with loyalty.
“Having said that,” Francesca went on, “what I did fifteen years ago doesn’t excuse your idiocy last night.”
Sera could make no sense of this. “And which of my illicit activities are you referring to on this particular occasion?”
Francesca raised elegant eyebrows. “ The Ninth Compendium of Uncommon Spells , obviously.”
Sera stared. Theo went very still beside her, which told her just about everything she needed to know. She set her jaw. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Francesca’s poise finally cracked completely. “We have CCTV at the estate these days, Sera. How could you have been so stupid?”
Sera was so irked that she almost set Francesca straight and informed her that, believe it or not, Sera had assumed that there was CCTV at the estate these days and therefore would certainly not have done the thing Francesca was obviously implying she had done.
She bit back this reply and said, struggling to keep her voice even, “Are you saying you have footage of me at the estate? Breaking my exile?”
“Of course not,” Francesca said impatiently. “We have footage of Theo at the estate. He broke into the restricted archives last night. In the company of a red fox, no less.”
Sera looked at Theo. Theo looked back at Sera. His eyes were wide, apologetic, and terrified.
Then, with rare good timing, there was a sharp tap on the outside of the window. “Sera!” Matilda called from the other side of the pane of glass, a basket of mushrooms hanging off one arm and a cup of tea in the other hand. “The fishmonger wants you, duckling!”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Sera said to Francesca, seizing the opportunity to get some proper answers out of Theo.
Francesca’s mouth pressed into a frustrated line, but she didn’t argue.
Taking Theo firmly by the arm, Sera whisked him out of the room with her.
She marched him down the hallway, past the old study they’d converted into Jasmine’s bedroom, and planted him firmly in the kitchen with a stern “Don’t move an inch. ”
Then she stomped back down to the bottom of the garden, where she collected the week’s fish delivery from the gruff fishmonger.
Returning to the kitchen, Sera found Jasmine encouraging Theo to eat a waffle smothered in chocolate.
Sera, who felt that if anyone deserved sweet treats right now, it was her , gave this scene a cranky look, put the fish away in the freezer, and set about getting some answers.
“Hurry up and eat that waffle before I steal it,” Sera said to Theo.
“If it were up to me, you’d have to subsist on broccoli and broth for the next seven years, but alas, Great-Auntie Jasmine seems to think even juvenile criminals must be allowed more than their fair share of sugar.
” Theo gave her a sheepish grin. Sera refused to allow it to melt her heart.
“Clemmie, I know you’re tucked away in some hidey-hole listening in, so get out of there and start talking. ”
“I’m almost twice your age, you know,” Clemmie said with a sniff, emerging from an upper cabinet. “A more respectful tone wouldn’t go amiss.”
Sera looked up at the chubby red fox on top of the cabinets. “I hate to break it to you, Clemmie, but your advanced years have no meaning when you failed so utterly in your quest to become the Wicked Witch of the Northeast that you trapped yourself in a form that attracts fleas.”
Clemmie let out a wail. “Not the fleas, Sera! You promised you would never tease me about the fleas!”
“And you promised you would never involve Theo in your nonsensical schemes!”
“I wanted to help, Sera!” Theo insisted earnestly, his mouth full of waffle. “Clemmie hasn’t got opposable thumbs! She needed someone to carry the spellbook!”
Jasmine gave Sera an aghast look. Sera wondered if any jury in the country would convict her if she drowned Clemmie in a well.
“Please tell me the two of you didn’t actually steal the spellbook!”
“What other choice did we have?” Clemmie demanded. “ You wouldn’t do it!”
“And do you know why I wouldn’t do it?” Sera snapped back. “Do you know why I only ever daydreamed about stealing that book? Because I knew we’d never get away with it! And would you look at that, I was right! Now tell me exactly what happened!”
Theo and Clemmie, it turned out, had left on Theo’s bicycle the night before, after pretending to go to bed (Jasmine looked so faint at the thought of Theo biking around the dark Lancashire countryside that Sera feared for a moment that a second resurrection spell would be called for), and had ridden all the way to the nearest train station in Burnley.
There, with Clemmie hiding in Theo’s backpack, they’d taken the eleven o’clock train to Haydon Bridge in Northumberland and had biked the eight miles from that station to the Guild’s estate, where Theo had snuck into the restricted section of the Guild’s library and nicked The Ninth Compendium .
(At this point, Jasmine had to sit down and soothe herself with the tea she’d made for Francesca.) With the spellbook safely in their possession, Theo and Clemmie had returned in time to catch the six o’clock train back to Lancashire.
“We didn’t know about the CCTV,” Theo said, hanging his head.
Clemmie thumped her tail irately. “The estate didn’t have any of that technological nonsense when I lived there.”
Sera struggled to find the words to adequately express her feelings. “You’re a child , Theo. You just went halfway across the country and back in the middle of the night! Anything could have happened to you!”
“That’s not fair,” said Clemmie, sounding genuinely wounded. “I would never have let anything happen to him.”
“ You’re what happened to him!” Sera reminded her.
There was a pause. Then Clemmie said, more quietly, “I can’t live like this for the rest of my life, Sera. Look at me!”
With a sense of impending doom, Sera saw exactly how this would go and did her very best to stop it. You have a heart of stone, Sera Swan, she told herself sternly. You are not going to feel sorry for the fox curled up on top of your kitchen cabinets.
“So you did it for you,” she said. “I promised I’d break your curse if I ever got my magic back, and you got tired of waiting.”
“I did it for both of us.”
“You got Theo involved,” Sera repeated. “I told you I didn’t want him involved. You did it anyway.”
“Did you not hear the part where I lack opposable thumbs?”
“And I’m already involved,” Theo insisted. “This matters to me too. I know how much you miss your magic, Sera. I wanted to help you get it back.”
Sera’s heart ached. She kissed the top of Theo’s head. “Thank you.” He wasn’t really the one she was angry with. “Where’s the book?”
“Hidden,” said Clemmie.
“Unhide it,” said Sera. “If we return it to Francesca now, we might be able to get out of this without the entire might of the Guild coming down on us.”
Clemmie’s tail twitched. “We can’t do that! Not after all the trouble we went to!”
“I don’t want to hear it. Give. It. To. Me.”
Clemmie growled low in her throat. “Under that chair.”
Sera reached under the old armchair tucked into the corner of the kitchen, beneath the draped blanket hiding the space from view, and retrieved a large, heavy tome wrapped in one of Theo’s jumpers.
Checking under the fabric, she saw the embossed gold letters of the title and felt a sharp needle of regret. God, she was so close.
“Stay put,” Sera said, and walked out of the kitchen. Spellbook or no spellbook, the first thing she had to do was keep Theo out of trouble.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8 (Reading here)
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54